


And All the World Made New

by Sholio



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: F/F, Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-15
Updated: 2007-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:16:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1638458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a rainy afternoon, Sophie Aubrey's worldview is shaken to its core. Light Sophie/Clarissa pairing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And All the World Made New

**Author's Note:**

  * For [makesmewannadie (norah)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/norah/gifts).



> Thank you very much to Marshalmeg for the beta, and to my recipient makesmewannadie for giving me the opportunity to work in a fandom (and style) very different from my usual one! I really enjoyed writing this.
> 
> Note added 5-16-2014: Wow, this fic was Baby's First Femslash. \o/ Actually, it was one of the first fics I'd ever written that even _had_ a pairing (I was pretty strictly a gen author up to this point). And also my first Yuletide fic ever. If I had it to do over, there would be much more pairing and less, well, gen ... but training wheels, training wheels. :D

 

 

A freshening wind came up from the Channel, swirling Sophie Aubrey's hair as she walked the path that led to her husband's observatory. Jack had never expressly forbidden her the place, but after years of importuning the children to stay away from Father's telescope, it was strangely difficult to pick her way through the lingering puddles from last night's rain, up to the little hut on the knoll. But there was nothing more to do this morning -- she had spent some time keeping the household accounts, then seen to it that the house was put in order, and now the afternoon stretched long before her.

For perhaps the first time since the very early days of her marriage, Sophie had Ashgrove to herself. Her mother and her mother's friend, Mrs. Morris, were gone up to Woolcombe, and with them, the children. Sophie herself was to join them, but first she had business: they were expecting a man up from town with some documents that needed her mark on them, pertaining to her husband's investments. Sophie herself did not quite understand the details; all she understood was that the man had been delayed, and delayed again, and her mother, who did not brook delay on any account, had insisted on departing as planned. The children's trunks were packed; why, the carriage itself had been hired, and most of the servants (such servants as they had, in any case) already sent to Woolcombe, so that the family would have been forced to subsist in a manner to which her mother refused to become accustomed. Thus Sophie found herself staying behind, with Mama's imperious promise to send Briggs down from Woolcombe in a day or so to fetch her. Sophie had been, in honesty, quite terrified, but to her own surprise she found the peace and silence very agreeable.

She did not enter the observatory, but stood for a time looking down on the toy-sized ships plying the harbor. It was too far to see the men on their decks, though her husband could perhaps have done so with the telescope. Grey clouds were rolling in over the water, blotting the sun with unexpected speed.

"It will rain again," Sophie said to herself, gathering her shawl around her shoulders. "Perhaps Ellen will make me a cup of tea, and I might read in front of the fire." It felt quite daring to contemplate an entire afternoon without the children's constant demands, or the strident voices of her mother and Mrs. Morris dissecting the neighbors' lives. The lawyer had recently sent word that he should not be up until tomorrow morning at the earliest, and the idea of an evening to spend in quiet study filled her with a sense of wicked joy.

As the first raindrops pattered around her, she realized that she might have misjudged the speed of the clouds, and tucked up her skirts to make a dash for the house. It was no good: by the time she reached the yard, her stockings were all over mud, her hair plastered to her head and the shawl slicked flat to her shoulders. She could only be grateful that most of the servants were gone; hopefully Ellen was not looking out the window.

Sophie stopped cold: from the sheeting grey rain, a horse and rider clattered towards her across the paving-stones: the lawyer had come earlier than expected. Sophie, in a fit of shock and embarrassment, clutched her sodden shawl around her shoulders and cast wildly about for the groom. But it was not the lawyer; a slight figure instead, with heavy riding-skirts -- a woman, Sophie thought in surprise. With further surprise, and some dismay, she recognized her cousin Diana's lodger, the widow Clarissa Oakes.

She did not know Clarissa Oakes. From all that her husband's letters had said of the woman, and more importantly all they had not said, she did not _wish_ to know Clarissa Oakes. They had met only once, at Diana's some time past, during one of her cousin's rare attempts to mend fences. It had been an awkward visit, made no less so by the fair-haired creature who would sit quietly with folded hands and then, just as Sophie had begun to forget her presence, would speak up with the sort of remarks quite unfit for polite company.

Sophie had, at first, taken Diana's new lodger to be "simple": a most unsuited companion for her cousin, who preferred friends as bright, ardent and rakish as Diana herself. But she had revised her opinion as the interminable visit wore on. It was not that Clarissa did not understand the conversation, simply that she had no knowledge of the social graces, none at all; and Diana, to Sophie's immense irritation, did not correct her but seemed more amused than anything else at her odd manner and uncouth questions. Sophie endeavored to ignore Clarissa to the extent that politeness would allow, and yet there was something about her that drew the eye, much as Diana did -- but where Diana's appeal was all dash and artifice, there was something about Clarissa that struck Sophie as very ... _natural_ , yes, that was it, in all senses of the word. "Someone's natural child, no doubt," she had thought, having only the vaguest idea of what the phrase actually meant. And yet, the more she tried to disdain Clarissa, the more her eyes were drawn back to the fair-haired child at the end of Diana's flowered divan.

Now that fair-haired child, dark and sleek with water, pulled her horse to a neat stop at Sophie's feet where she stood shivering in the rain. "Good morning!" Clarissa said, and lit down as gracefully as a gentleman's daughter making a pirouette at a ball, hardly seeming to notice the twin splashes of her boots. "This is a fine rain, isn't it?"

Sophie blinked the droplets from her lashes. "I suppose it is very ..." and she trailed off, unable to think of a single pleasant thing to say.

Clarissa seemed utterly innocent of Sophie's discomfiture in the rain. Her hood was down, her cheeks pink with cold and excitement in a way that made Sophie quite awkward and acutely aware of her own sodden state. "Diana has been teaching me to ride," Clarissa explained, patting the horse's damp nose, "and I asked if I might take the bay out for a little time and explore the countryside."

"Explore?" said Sophie, for whom travel was a necessary evil to conduct one's person from one place to another, to be endured but certainly never enjoyed. "You cannot mean that you rode all the way from Barham Down -- yourself, a woman, alone?" Such a thing could barely be fathomed; well, of course Diana would have done it, but Diana was a strange, thoughtless creature.

"Yes, of course -- but I'm sorry, poor thing, to leave you standing there in your wet clothes" -- this, not to Sophie but to the horse. "You must be awfully tired. Lady Aubrey, you will not find me rude if I take her to the stables?"

Sophie realized that she was standing in the rain, permitting a guest to be soaked through; what would her mother think? "No, no, where is Hawker? He will take your horse. Hawker --"

They were halfway to the stables before they found the groom, who appeared out of the storm, took one look at his mistress's bedraggled state and hastily averted his eyes. "Catch your death, miss; you ain't been out here long? Take her for you, there -- I'll give her a good rub, and, that is, --" His eyes slid sideways and then studiously returned to his business.

"Thank you, Hawker," Sophie said primly, and turned towards the main house with her unwanted guest a step behind, the rain a shifting curtain around them. Somewhere above, a shaft of lightning rent the firmament and Sophie cried out, despite herself, at the thunderclap that shivered the air.

Clarissa cried out as well, but looking at her, Sophie saw that she did not look afraid: her eyes were luminous in the flat grey light, and when she saw Sophie looking at her, a smile spread over her face and her fingers -- small, wet, strong -- slid into Sophie's. "I don't believe --" Sophie began, but then Clarissa gave her hand a pull, and they ran for the house -- Sophie forgetting to hold up her skirts, so that they swung wet and heavy around her legs, and would have tripped her if not for Clarissa's unexpected strong arm keeping her upright. A moment later they dripped into the house, breathless, laughing.

"I can't -- I haven't run like that since I was a girl." Sophie bent to lean on her knees, gasping. Her mother would have been scandalized, but she could not stop smiling, even when her wet hair fell in the corner of her mouth.

"Exercise is good for the lymphatic system and restores the balance of vital humours, so Stephen says." Clarissa trailed water into the house; Sophie gasped and ran after her, only to pull up short when Clarissa produced an enormous horse-pistol from somewhere in her skirts and laid it atop a drawing-table.

"That is for show, certainly," Sophie said, studying it with the grave care of a woman contemplating a live snake and wondering what might be countenanced a safe distance for its breed.

"Why no, it is loaded and ready. I thought I might encounter bandits or other rough men on the moors." She did not seem especially concerned at the idea.

"Oh," said Sophie faintly.

"I must clean it; else there will be rust. It is Diana's."

"But not in the parlor!" Sophie gasped, looking about for a cloth to place under it as water trickled dangerously near her mother's collection of Oriental porcelain.

Ellen Pratt saved her just then, and the porcelain as well, appearing from the kitchen with floury hands and her mouth open in an 'O' of shock. There was much fussing before Clarissa was packed off to one of the unused bedrooms to change into some of Sophie's things -- much too large, but dry and servicable. Sophie herself took a stack of folded laundry from Ellen off to her own bedroom and sent Ellen away to lay a fire and prepare the tea service.

She had no idea how to dress for tea with Mrs. Oakes. Normally her mother would be present to pick out precisely the right gown to convey her attitude towards her guest. Sophie had long since learned that her own choices were met with critique, such that it was easier to simply let her mother choose for her on those occasions that mattered. Finally she decided that it did not matter much: her mother was not present, and while the afternoon's events would surely wing their way to Mama's ears on Ellen's lips, the family was not on good terms with Diana anyway so it seemed unimportant to endear herself to Diana's lodger. She chose the blue muslin and wrapped herself in a dark woolen shawl that Jack had brought her from some land she could not even pronounce. Hopefully the ensemble conveyed a staid and sensible matron who would never dream of such a thing as running in the rain. Her hair was hopeless; she knotted it out of the way as best she could. Perhaps she might do something with it when it dried.

Clarissa was already in the parlor when she got there, the horse-pistol nowhere to be seen. (Sophie later learned that Ellen had spirited it off to the stables while Mrs. Oakes was dressing, into Hawker's keeping.) Indeed, Clarissa sat with the deportment of a lady, though she had not awaited her host to pour her tea and neither, Sophie noted with annoyance, had Ellen waited to serve it.

"It is still raining; I had a look out the window, and the fury of the wind is something to behold." Clarissa offered her a smile; there was a shyness to it. Her joyous abandon of earlier had deserted her; she was in her element in the rain, but here in the parlor, the traditional woman's domain, she seemed as out of place as Jack Aubrey would have been, despite her studious manners. Sophie could not help noticing that Clarissa had not put up her hair; it curled in wet loops on her forehead and shoulders, darkened by the rain to a rich honey colour that caught the firelight pleasingly.

Sophie looked away and poured her own tea, as Ellen was nowhere to be seen. "I am the only one here, you know," she said, flustered and searching for conversation. "Mama and the children are gone to Woolcombe."

"I know," Clarissa said, and when Sophie cast her a startled glance: "I had heard from some of Diana's friends that your mother was away. You will pardon me for saying, but she does not like me much. I would not come round if she were here; it would distress me, and likewise you, I imagine."

Sophie wondered that Clarissa should care if it distressed her or not; they could hardly be said to be friends. But she was too polite to say so. "And things are well at Barham Down?" she asked, sipping her cooling tea.

"As well as might be; the child --" but here she stopped, and Sophie pressed her lips together, seeing Clarissa look down and occupy herself stirring sugar into her tea. The subject of Brigid was a sore one with Sophie's mother, and she realized that Clarissa expected the same to be true of her. To her own surprise, she realized that it was not, at least not for Clarissa's sake; Sophie laid the blame for Brigid squarely on Diana's shoulders, for it was well known that a frigid mother could ruin a child. But this was not Clarissa's fault, whatever her mother might think, and she tried to think of some way to say this. The words did not come, so she reached out and put her hand on Clarissa's knee, as she might have comforted one of her sisters.

Startlement flashed through the grey eyes; for a moment, small strong fingers curled over Sophie's, dry now and warm, and not at all like her sisters'. Then the moment was gone -- Clarissa curled both her wonderfully mobile hands around her teacup -- Sophie drew back -- and she felt oddly guilty, as if she'd transgressed in some way she could not understand. She sheltered herself hastily beneath a cloak of frosty politeness. "Ellen can bring you hair-pins, and other niceties, should you wish," she said with a pointed look at Clarissa's unfixed hair.

"Oh, she has done so, but I do not care for them; my hair will dry more quickly if it is not tied up, and I should not like to be wet for my ride back to Barham Down."

At this, Sophie could not suppress a vivid mental picture of Clarissa on the moors, ahorse with her hair unpinned and tossed by the wind, bright in the sun; much like Diana in her heyday but without Diana's hawkish mein. The image pleased her in the same guilty way as the furtive hand-clasp -- she felt her ears warm, and her heart melted a little. "It may be hours yet; the rain is falling steady."

"I know," said Clarissa. "I did not mean to impose on you; I should have sent word, sent a card perhaps -- is that how it is done?"

Sophie laughed. "Is it visiting or courting you mean?"

It was a joke, of course, but Clarissa paused before she said, "Visiting of course. Would it be very forward of me to ask if I might see your house? I have not been here before, and I am not much acquainted with English country houses."

"You are not English?" Sophie asked in surprise. There was nothing in her speech of the French, nor in her complexion of the Spanish.

"Oh, no, no; I am English, and I did once live in a place not so different from Barham Down, but I have been long at sea and have forgotten most of what I knew."

Sophie could not quite read Clarissa's tone. "It is just a house, nothing unusual; and not so large as Diana's."

"It would still be interesting to me. I should love very much to see it."

Feeling herself a poor host if she did not oblige her guest, Sophie set aside her tea and endeavored to show Clarissa about Ashgrove Cottage. As Sophie had noted at Diana's, Clarissa had little sense of propriety; she wished to see the kitchens with the same ardor as the sitting-rooms, and she showed particular fascination for the scullery, which made Ellen Pratt so nervous that she left off scrubbing pans and went away in a fit.

"It is most interesting to me, how things are done," Clarissa explained to Sophie as they climbed the stairs. "Stephen -- that is, Dr. Maturin, has been very kind in this; he indulged me greatly, and explained everything with great patience, though I am sure he must have found my company frightfully dull. I am not very well educated, you know."

Sophie chewed over this morsel as they toured the children's playroom. Her mother and Mrs. Morris were not at all shy with their opinions on the relationship of Mrs. Oakes to both Dr. Maturin and Jack Aubrey, or for that matter, the relationship of those two with each other. Knowing her husband as she did, Sophie was inclined to think the worst of him when it came to woman's company, if not Stephen's; but surely Clarissa would not have come to call on her if she had been indiscreet with her husband.

"It must be very pleasant to be a child in this house," Clarissa said, drawing Sophie's attention back to her. Standing at the window looking down over the rain-swept yard, she was thin as a blade, her face averted -- which, regrettably or not, left Sophie quite a good view of damp, honey-colored hair curling on her long, slim neck.

"I hope they find it so." For all her ambivalence towards her guest, Sophie's sympathetic heart moved at Clarissa's subdued tone. "Your childhood was ... unhappy?" she ventured cautiously, moving closer.

Clarissa's shoulders rose in a very slight shrug. "I doubt it was less happy than most, but of course I have nothing to compare." She stared into the yard for a moment more, the fresh wet wind in her face, then turned to Sophie, open and strangely vulnerable, her cheeks reddened from the wind or from emotion. "May I be frank with you, Lady Aubrey?"

Sophie thought her own cheeks must be flaming. "Do not call me that, I beg; I am not; let me be Sophie, plain Sophie."

"Not plain, not at all." Clarissa smiled wanly, and stepped away from the window, her shyness much at odds with her earlier confidence. Sophie thought of her again in the parlor, determined yet ill at ease. "I have sailed with your husband, you know --"

Sophie stiffened. "Please, let us not speak of that."

"Oh, I have caused offense; I'm sorry. I often do, without meaning." Worrying her lip, Clarissa reached out and clasped Sophie's hand in both of hers; Sophie did not pull away, even when Clarissa's thumb stroked lightly across the pulse-point of her inner wrist. "I meant only that we have acquaintances in common, and I owe much to your husband and to Dr. Maturin. I would like very much to be your friend, Sophie, for all that I am in Diana's debt too. I know there is bad blood between you, but I would like to be your friend, regardless."

The grey eyes were clear, open, sincere. Sophie shivered at the light yet implacable hands on her own; she felt as if she stood on a precipice, and with one wrong step might fall. "Yes," she said, "yes," and felt the edge crumbling under her feet. "Yes, we might be friends; I will not hold Diana against you." My husband is perhaps a different matter, she thought, but did not say aloud.

The hands clasped hers more tightly, and then went, with a last lingering brush, finger to palm; her skin felt cold with their absence.

They moved on from the playroom, walking now shoulder to shoulder, Sophie herself far more at ease than she had expected. She pointed out items that Jack had brought back from distant lands. Clarissa was not much for the pottery and glass, but she stopped to admire a clockwork in the hallway, its brass parts winking in the dull light.

"I can see why you would have got on with Stephen."

Clarissa looked up, quirking a smile. "Oh, I am nothing like him; he only indulged me, I think."

It was nearly dark in the hallway, the brass of the clockworks gleaming dully and striking a reflective glow in Clarissa's eyes. Somehow the darkness gave the illusion of privacy -- from servants, from each other. Sophie could not quite explain it, but when Clarissa stepped forward, she did not step back; the other woman was short and had to tilt her head back to look Sophie in the eyes, giving Sophie something of the superior position and thus the courage to stand her ground. Clarissa was in her space now, far beyond that which casual acquaintance might dictate. Another step and they must touch.

"You must be hungry, after your ride." Sophie's voice was high and bright. "You will stay for dinner, of course?"

"It is surely not so late."

It was not; but they ate a light meal in the sitting-room, Ellen bringing odds and ends from the kitchen: bread, some cheeses, cold chicken. They sat close together, and sometimes their elbows bumped when one of them reached for the sugar as the other put her hand out for the jam.

Again Sophie had the sense that the ground underfoot had grown soft, treacherous. Her life was one of certainties, of boxes drawn around her by her mother and society. To use Jack's parlance, she was sailing uncharted waters with neither compass nor sextant.

"I must tell her to leave," she thought, but Clarissa looked so young in the firelight, so terribly young with eyes so terribly old. Her hair was drying slowly, curling in wisps around her face. "She is quite well-looking," Jack had written once, in his letters; and indeed, she was, though Sophie thought it a waifish sort of prettiness and not the sturdy, healthy appeal of the daughters of her mother's acquaintances.

Children of her mother's friends -- but did she truly have any friends of her own? The idea startled her, and she covered her shock with a discreet cough, busying herself quickly buttering another scone. Still, with whom did she spend her days? Her mother had friends, so too her husband -- but what of her? The children were the sum of her hours, that and attending her mother on rounds of visits to distant kin and elderly relatives. She could sit in pleasant conversation with their daughters and daughters-in-law, talking of babies and, rather shyly, of men; but she knew no one who would harness a trap to come spend an afternoon with Sophia Aubrey.

No one but the woman-child in the firelight beside her, whom she did not even know -- who had ridden across the moors merely to see her for an afternoon.

Ellen cleared away the tea things. Outside the windows, rain still hung a gray curtain across the world, fading into the early dusk of a heavily overcast day. Ellen lit a lamp, and brought out glasses of claret to chase their meal.

"I fear I must prevail upon you for lodging tonight," Clarissa said.

"Will Diana worry? Should I send word?"

"No; her absences are common, with no excuse made. Though I know we are not of the same station, she does not look down on me insofar as I can tell; I think she should not mind if I take my own liberty upon occasion."

For some reason that speech made her think of Jack -- Jack Aubrey, and his many liberties at sea. Sophie did not often drink, and the liquor warmed her stomach and brought a rush of heat to her face. She sought for a new conversational topic, but while they had chatted prettily during their meal, the words seemed to have fallen away from her. The room was too small, too hot; she fanned herself, forgetting the glass of claret, and nearly spilled on her skirts.

Clarissa's fingers curled gently around Sophie's on the claret-glass, and set it aside. "You do not drink much, I warrant," and her voice was soft and low, almost affectionate. Sophie blinked, and found the other woman studying her, head cocked to one side. In the firelight, Clarissa's grey eyes were alive with many hues, shifting and changing as the flames danced in them.

"You are not much like your cousin, not at all," she said.

"I should pray not," Sophie said without thinking, and then she blushed scarlet.

Clarissa's hand still wrapped about Sophie's, the claret set aside, forgotten. With some hesitation, Clarissa reached out cautious fingertips and touched the blush still flaming on Sophie's cheek: a delicate flutter, no greater than a wisp of hair blown across her cheek.

Sophie shivered.

The fingers explored her face, gently, as the dumb and blind are sometimes said to do; except that Clarissa's eyes were open -- large and dark -- the pupils widened until only the barest sliver of grey could still be seen. Sophie did not, could not move; her breath caught in her chest as the small fingers traced her jaw, her cheekbone, the soft skin before her ear, and brushed away a curl that had escaped her hair-pins. Clarissa's hands were delicate and cool, and Sophie fancied she could feel their lingering touch trailing behind them, like rain-water tracing its beaded paths on a glass.

Still she could not move. The guilty awareness that Ellen could enter the room at any moment sharpened her senses to a razor-edge -- distant, she heard the splashing of water in the scullery, the muffled clanking of pans. The fire sent up a loud snap, making her flinch; Clarissa whispered, "Hush," as if she thought she had caused it: "Hush, hush," and she cupped Sophie's face in her small square palms.

That broke the spell, for Jack had sometimes cupped her jaw just like that, but with his big, callused, seaman's hands. Sophie drew back with a jolt, recovering herself; when she dared look at her guest, Clarissa was sitting much as she had at Diana's -- hands folded in her lap, as proper as a clergyman's daughter.

Sophie did not know what to say: did not, in fact, know what had happened, for she knew, from snatches of conversation half-understood, that men could sometimes seek each other's company at sea, but she had never heard of such things in a company of women. Certainly her mother's circle did not speak of it. So perhaps she had misread Clarissa's intentions -- "She is a forthright thing, and unschooled, as she has said," Sophie thought, and brought her claret to her lips with hands that trembled slightly. "Perhaps she is only being friendly, and it is I who have misunderstood."

"Forgive me," Clarissa said, and Sophie looked up at her. The grey eyes were downcast, and for a moment she wished she could see their many subtle colors again.

"It is no great moment," Sophie replied, and recklessly drained the glass. When she stood, she staggered, overcome by the wine and heat following so quickly on her meal, and that after the shock of being drenched in cold rain. For an instant the room wavered around her, and Clarissa was there, catching her elbow. "I think I might lie down," Sophie said; she had taken to doing this in the afternoons after the birth of her youngest, whenever it was possible to find the time.

"Of course, of course; let me help you," and on Clarissa's arm, she climbed the stairs.

Knowing her mistress's habits, Ellen had turned down the sheets on the big bed. Clarissa eased her down, and Sophie sat, with a sense of deep embarrassment. "I am so sorry, Clarissa, so frightfully sorry; what a terrible host I am, overcome with wine, and you helping me to my bed!"

"It was only a cup," Clarissa said, kneeling to help her with her shoes; her manner brisk and businesslike in the way of one who is accustomed to tending a young child, as she had no doubt been doing at Diana's. "I did not think myself that it should affect you so. I have grown used to Diana; she takes half a bottle at bedtime, and more throughout the day, except when she is fox-hunting because she says it makes her dull."

Sophie laughed softly. "It must be hard for you to live with her."

"Hard?" Clarissa seemed genuinely surprised. "Oh no, there is no hardship. I like Diana, and I hope she likes me. She is unhappy, and the house is large, but I do not find it difficult, though sometimes I miss the sea. May I take your shawl?"

"Thank you," Sophie murmured, and she curled on the pillows while Clarissa hung up the shawl. "So very sorry -- I need only sleep for a little while, to sleep off the wine, you know." A yawn cracked her jaw; she tried to muffle it down to a ladylike squeak.

To her surprise, Clarissa came back to sit on the edge of the bed. "Please stop apologizing. I am glad I came. I have enjoyed myself very much and I look forward to more conversation tonight." Her hands were restless in a way that seemed much at odds with her normally quiet demeanor: plucking her skirt, smoothing the bedcovers with furtive pats.

"You might --" Sophie interrupted herself with another yawn. "You might ask Ellen to make up a bed for you; the girls' room may answer, as I do not believe the guest rooms are in a fit state for company."

"I would be content to stay here, if you do not object. You said that we might be friends."

Sophie blinked at her; in her fuddled state, she could not quite understand what was being asked, or at least could not figure out what Clarissa meant by it. "Yes, of course, we are friends."

Clarissa said nothing, merely rose and skimmed off her shoes. Sophie's eyes must have drifted shut, for the next thing she knew was a warm presence beside her, disturbing the coverlet as it slid beneath.

Sophie's eyes blinked open sleepily to meet that startling grey gaze, now observing her from bare inches away: so close that their breath mingled and Clarissa's fair hair spilled across the pillow to tickle her ear.

She must have gone tense, for Clarissa's arms came up; Clarissa's hand touched her shoulder, as gently as ever a spooked horse was soothed, and Clarissa's voice said, "I shall go, if you want me to."

"No," Sophie whispered, and all the loneliness of the sea-wife breathed out of her in that syllable. "No. Stay."

The golden head dipped towards hers, and cheek brushed cheek before Clarissa's smaller head slid down to rest in the crook of Sophie's neck. Her soft exhalations stirred the fine hairs and made Sophie tremble, even as Clarissa's arms slipped around her and she found herself held as she had not been since Jack's last homecoming; and the lips that brushed her neck in the softest of kisses were gentle, so gentle.

The final barrier broke; the final step off the cliff was taken; and she fell, she flew, she wrapped her arms around Clarissa and buried her face in the fair hair, and held on tight as the hands stroked her, held her -- comfort given each to each, on and on; until they both slept, so tangled up in each other so that it could not be said where one ended and the other began.

* * *

The rain is pass'd, and all the world made new,  
tho' Summer's hand to April's quiv'ring breast  
shall press but gently, as the new-born dew  
springs freshen'd from each leaf her lips caress'd.  
 _-Collected Writings of Sophia Aubrey, as compiled by Brigid Maturin (1858)_

Also see enclosed certain Poetic Fragments of Mama's that pertain to our discussion this February last. In light of these Theories of yours about which we spoke, I might ask that you consider withholding the inclusion of some of the more Private of these from the book you are compiling, at least until I have a chance to speak with Fan; she is more sensible of such things due to her closer intimacy with Mama when we were girls. Please, Bridie, think of the family's Reputation, if nothing else.  
 _\- excerpt from a letter from Charlotte Raines, née Aubrey, to her "cousin" Brigid Maturin, 1856_

I think the family's Reputation, as you put it, can fend perfectly well for itself; it is past the need for nursing and has put away its training-pants, so I wager we need not baby it any longer. Or so I assume, knowing the natural life-cycle of such things as Reputations only by distant acquaintance, for neither Papa nor I have ever felt the want, as you well know. By the way, please convey for me the enclosed specimen to Mr. Littleton at the Royal College; I believe it is a previously unknown butterfly that he should find quite significant.  
 _\- excerpt from Brigid Maturin's response_

 


End file.
